Integral
by Badmitton
Summary: Hellsing thinks about her name, or, Arthur Hellsing must've been a huge dork to name his daughter after a mathematical operation, or, I'm a huge dork for entertaining the thought.


I wrote this mostly because I thought last year, "Man, Arthur Hellsing must be a huge nerd if he named his daughter "Integral,"

xxx

I've let everyone think my name is Integra. It's not a bad name. It speaks of strength, fortitude, and conscious acts of the mind and will. It fits me very well, but it is not my name.

My name is Integral.

I remember standing before the desk of my teacher when I was ten years old, clutching my books and trying to keep my glasses (then much too large for my face) from slipping off my nose.

"Oh, hello there," She'd said, taking note of my white-blonde hair and disproportionately dark skin, "You must be Integra Hellsing." I'd grinned, pained, but chose not to correct her, the harsh 't' sound she'd forced into my name grating on my ears.

"Integral" is all soft, smooth sounds. It's subtle, whispering of answers to questions you never knew you had.

"Integra" sounds like running face-first into a brick corner as a large German man screams at you to remain steadfast.

At one point that same year, my class was utterly unmanageable. My peers were shifting and spitting into one another's faces, the tantalizing thrill of the winter holidays no doubt sparking in their cavemen minds. Exasperated, my teacher promised an early recess to anyone who could add one, then, two, then three, etc. all the way up to a hundred.

"When you finish the problem," she maintained sternly, "You may leave." I grinned. then. I remember writing a single line before raising my hand.

"The answer is five thousand fifty." I kept my face neutral, but I took great delight in my teacher's clearly confused face.

"Well, Miss Hellsing," she'd all but sneered, shifting uncomfortably. "Why don't you show your work to the class?" So I did. I gathered my things and walked to the chalkboard.

"One plus a hundred is one hundred and one." I explained in a monotone, tossing my head to shift my glasses back into their proper place. "Two plus ninety-nine is one hundred and one, and so on. There are fifty pairs like this in the series. So the answer will be one hundred and one times fifty, or, five thousand fifty." Without another word, I'd moved to the door to wrench it open, pausing only to pivot and say "Oh, and my name is Integral."

I didn't get good grades that year.

Of course, I can't take credit for this stroke of youthful genius, for this particular solution often cropped up in my father's bedtime stories. I knew the problem through my father's enraptured anecdotes on some well-known but still publicly obscure mathematician.

My bedtime stories (when not from _Dracula_ or _Carmilla_), consisted of anecdotes such as these. I was rarely interested, falling asleep almost instantly, but my father would ramble on, enraptured by the castles he'd built in his mind. I didn't realize it until I was older, until I took over his empire, that my father was a fantastical man, the picture of de Tocqueville's bourgeoisie.

While his mind floated away go grow giddy on abstract concepts, he utterly spoiled his body on drink and lewd women. He was not a practical man, only barely holding the Hellsing Organization together with Walter's help (I'm sure Alucard teased him mercilessly, as he does me now. It unsettles me a little to think that Alucard's way of distracting my father was by playing at being a young girl.) He was not a man of solutions; he was a man of lofty, imponderable problems.

I think that's why he named me the way he did.

An integral is not a problem, it is the solution. As all other terms fade away to nothing, the integral stands firm and resolved. There are no other possibilities, no other answers. There can only be so much area under a certain curve, and the integral expresses it firmly and unwaveringly.

When one asks, "How much," it cries with absolute certainty, "This much."

It is the opposite of its partner. The derivative expresses a relation that does not truly exist, describes a pattern of quantities that ultimately shrink into nothing. While it has its uses, its existence is questionable.

I hope that it's why he named me so. I hope that he understood his own weaknesses, realized that our family needed an intiderivative for his derivative. The Hellsing Organization needed a solution to its (to Arthur's) problems.

I am that solution.

I am Integral.


End file.
